How Fastly's CDN Service works

Fastly is a content delivery network (CDN). We serve as an Internet intermediary and offer the Fastly CDN Service to make transmission of your content to your end users more efficient.

You can make content available through your websites and Internet-accessible (hosted) application programming interfaces (APIs). You can create content (customer-generated content), as can your end users (user-generated content). Fastly's CDN Service then makes the transmission of that content (which we sometimes refer to as "content objects") more efficient by automatically storing copies at intermediate locations on a temporary basis. The process of storing these copies is known as "caching" and the server locations in which they are stored are referred to as "caches."

Fastly's delivers its CDN service from key access points to the Internet called "points of presence" (POPs). Fastly places POPs where their connectivity to the Internet reduces network transit time when delivering content to end-users. Each POP has a cluster of Fastly cache servers. When end users request your content objects, Fastly delivers them from whichever of the cache locations are closest to each end user.

Fastly's caches only receive and process your end user requests for content objects. You decide which objects will be cached, for how long, who can access them, whether they are to be encrypted when transmitted over the Internet, and when the objects will be deleted from the caching service. You make these decisions by specifically configuring Fastly's CDN Service with these requirements. We refer to this configuration process as "provisioning."

To provision Fastly's CDN service, you must identify which of your application servers will provide the original content objects for each of your various domains (e.g., company.com, myco.com). Your application servers can be physical servers in a datacenter or hosting facility, or applications running on cloud services like Amazon, or any combination. Fastly refers to these source servers as "origin" and "backend" servers interchangeably.

The first time each Fastly cache receives a request for a content object, it fetches the object from the appropriate origin server. If multiple origin servers are specified, the cache will distribute the processing load for the fetches across all of them (based on the configuration criteria set by you). After the content object is fetched, the cache stores a copy of it and forwards its response to the end user.

Each time after the first time an end user requests that same content object, the Fastly cache fulfills requests by retrieving the cached copy from storage (or memory) and immediately delivering it to the end user – the fetch step to the original copy is not repeated until the content object either expires or becomes invalidated.

Can Fastly host my content?

We accelerate your site by caching both static assets and dynamic content by acting as a reverse proxy to your origin server (also known as "Origin Pull"), but we do not provide services for uploading your content to our servers.